Quirky quotes by Prince Philip

Prince Philip (pictured), Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is quite famous in Britain for often making rather embarrassing, though often funny, comments.

A few are listed below:

In 1953 immediately after the coronation when his wife became Queen of England, he asked her: Where did you get that hat?

In 1969, after The Royal Variety Performance, he asked Tom Jones: What do you gargle with - pebbles?

In 1986 he told a World Wildlife Fund meeting: If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.

In 1986 he told a group of British students in China: If you stay here much longer, you'll all get slitty-eyed.

In 1965 he said: The only active sport I will follow is polo - and most of the work is done by the pony.

Helicopters at cross purposes

India's Dhruv helicopters perform at the "Aero India 2009" in Yelahanka air base on the outskirts of Bangalore, India, Thursday.

Aviation companies from around the world are participating in the five-day event.

(AP Photo / February 12, 2009)

Robot performs at Science Museum in London

Content developer Louis Buckley plays 'Paper, Scissors, Stone' with robot 'Berti' at the Science Museum in London. The robot, a life size humanoid robot, is built to mimic human gesturing, and is on show at London's Science Museum from Feb. 17 to 19. (AP Photo / February 17, 2009)

The ant and the grasshopper

We have all heard the story of the thrifty hard-working ant and the lazy ne’er-do-well grasshopper. Following is an updated version of the story that sadly is a reflection of the times.

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In a meadow on a hot summer’s day, a Grasshopper was chirping and carousing his time away. He watched scornfully as an Ant nearby struggled to store up large kernels of food and build a secure nest. The Ant pulled overtime shifts to pay off his loans and accumulate retirement funds for the future.

“Give it a rest,” the Grasshopper said. “Why bother saving and slaving and toiling and moiling? Let’s party!” The Ant demurred: “I am planning ahead for winter and you should do the same.” The Grasshopper blew off the Ant, squandered his supplies the rest of the season, and abandoned his home while on vacation (paid for by tapping every last cent of his home equity gain) instead of holding down a job.

When winter came, the Grasshopper’s pantry was empty and his shelter ruined from neglect. The Ant, weary from planting, harvesting, and stocking up for months, was dining comfortably in his nest.

Cold, hungry, jobless, facing foreclosure, and up to his two pairs of eyeballs in debt, the Grasshopper limped to the Association of Community Winged Insects for Rescue Now and demanded recourse.

The office was swamped with thousands just like him. ACWIRN immediately put the Grasshopper to work registering dead ants as new voters.


Funded with tax dollars from the rest of the meadow’s residents, ACWIRN organized mass protests at the Bank of Antamerica, ambushed its top officials at their private homes, harassed their children, and demanded that the meadow’s politicians halt all foreclosures.

We must keep Grasshoppers in their houses and outlaw discriminatory lending practices against starving, homeless Grasshoppers.

The banking industry capitulated; the Orthoptera Lobby secured hundreds of millions of dollars in housing earmarks and grants and counseling subsidies to support the Grasshoppers with the shadiest credit and employment histories.

Antie Mae, the meadow’s government-backed home lending giant, fueled the push for increased insect homeownership in the name of biodiversity.

Its executives cooked the books and headed for the hills.

Katie Cricket and the Mainstream Meadow Media joined the grievance-for-profit circus, profiling Grasshopper sob stories and drumming up ratings as bewildered Ants wondered who was looking out for them.

The banks drowned in toxic debt. More Grasshoppers fell behind on their mortgage payments. Bailout mania and panic gripped the meadow.

Our little Ant, minding his own business, heard a knock on his door one late winter night a year later. It was his old, sneering Grasshopper neighbor.

With ACWIRN’s presidential candidate, Barack Cicada, now in office, the Grasshopper had been hired by the meadow as a tax collector.

“I’m here to take your provisions,” the Grasshopper cackled.

But it was the Ant who had the last laugh. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he told his shiftless friend. “Why bother saving and slaving and toiling and moiling? I’ve spent all my savings. I’m walking away from my mortgage. Thrift is for suckers,” the Ant said as he headed out the door, leaving the Grasshopper empty-handed.

Link

His grass gauge always read half full

A Utah man took his newly acquired used SUV to a mechanic to find out why the gas gauge always read half-full.

The mechanic looked inside the gas tank and found about 35 pounds of marijuana in plastic-wrap packages that filled about half of the tank's volume.

Police estimate the pot is worth about $35,000.

The Nissan Armada has had several different owners and was once a rental car.

The present owner, who is not a suspect, found that a stash of grass can take the place of a lot of gas, but it didn't help the mileage.

Link

Who will pay for the Obama spending spree?

This kid will pay … along with his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.

Float ready for Rio de Janeiro parade

A member of the Unidos do Viradouro samba school gives the final touches to a float in Samba City in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Samba City is a sort of workshop where Rio's samba schools make their floats and the fancy dresses for the carnival parade next week.

(AFP / Getty Images Photo / February 17, 2009

Why the White House is taking over the census

(click on cartoon to enlarge)

Truth about the once great New York Times

The once proud New York Times, known as the “Gray Lady” for its staid appearance and style, was once regarded as a national newspaper of record.

How the mighty has fallen!

The New York Times keeps stooping to new depths. Political diversity has disappeared. The liberal editorial bias has shifted to political news stories making most of them untruthful and unreliable.

On more than one occasion the Times surreptitiously obtained sensitive material useful to our terrorist enemies and printed it in attempts to embarrass President George W. Bush.

Their content is basically: all Repubicans are bad, all liberal Democrats are good and Obama is great.

Now it seems their nearly complete lack of integrity may have caused the near financial collapse of the Times.

Someone at the Times is probably wondering how they can blame Bush for their downfall as they compose the last editorial.

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The share price of the New York Times now cost less than the newsstand price of the Sunday paper!

(click on picture to enlarge)

Shares of New York Times (NYT) dropped 29 cents Thursday to close at $3.77. The Sunday paper goes for $4 at the newsstand.

Maybe they could save costs by printing the paper on their stock certificates.

Until the paper finally folds, there may still be a New York Times coming to a birdcage near you.

Link

The Chicago Tea Party - must see video!

The Chicago trading floor was buzzing on whether the government's plan to save the economy will actually help the markets, with Jason Roney, Sharmac Capital; Wilbur Ross Jr., WL Ross & Co. and CNBC's Rick Santelli.

The government is promoting bad behavior... do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages... This is America!

How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage?

President Obama - are you listening?

How about we all stop paying our mortgage!

The Chicago trading floor mocks the Obama plan! The video can be seen here.

Stock market responds to Obama spending spree

The Dow responds to the Obama stimulus bill by showing the lowest close in more than 6 years.

Link

Eye-popping spectacle in Tokyo - revisited

No, the Clingons haven’t landed. These are eye-poping street performers in Tokyo, Japan.

Oklahoma cop pulls man over for anti-Obama sign

Capt. Steve McCool of the Oklahoma City Police Department said an officer who wrongly pulled a man over last week and confiscated an anti-Barack Obama sign from his vehicle misinterpreted the sign as threatening.

Chip Harrison was driving to work when a police car followed him for several miles and then signaled for him to pull over.

''I pulled over, knowing I hadn't done anything wrong," Harrison said in a recent phone interview.

When the officer asked Harrison if he knew why he had been pulled over, Harrison said he did not.

''They said, 'It's because of the sign in your window,'" Harrison said.

The sign said, "Abort Obama, not the unborn."

''It's not meant to be a threat, it's a statement about abortion," Harrison said.

He said he disagrees with the president's position on abortion.

But that was just the beginning.

The Secret Service called Harrison at his place of work and said they were at his house.

Harrison said he feels his First Amendment rights were violated when they entered his house to look around while his wife and 2-year-old were at home.

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I have four questions:

1. If aborting means killing, why aren’t abortionists arrested?

2. Will this be a small sample of what will happen after Obama’s National Police Force is in place? A National Police Force was one of his campaign promises.

3. How many motorists were pulled over and visited by the Secret Service for having violent hate Bush - Cheney signs in their vehicles?

4. Where can I get a sign like Chip Harrison had in his car?

Link

GM needs $30B more: Chrysler needs $5B more

General Motors says it needs another $30 Billion and Chrysler says it must have another $5 Billion.

Will GM and Chrysler get the relief they need from the federal treasury? In a word, yes.

Obama, as well as most other Democrats who were elected last November owe a lot to labor unions.

Now it’s payback time and Obama will never allow GM and Chrysler to go under leaving over 200,000 union workers unemployed.

Link here and here for the financial needs of GM and Chrysler.

Automaker bailout may have green strings

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We are learning what he meant by transparency

Mr. Obama promised transparency in government. Instead of transparency, there was the secrecy of working on the stimulus bill in the dead of night to keep Republicans out of the process. Now there is the tale of the Obama White House missing documents.

In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama shut down his predecessor’s system for reviewing regulations, realigned and expanded two key White House policymaking bodies and extended economic sanctions against parties to the conflict in the African nation of Cote D’Ivoire.

We don’t even know what “parties” the sanctions were against! Possibly they were against the "nationals" who are trying to stop what's happening in Cote D'Ivoire!

Despite the intense scrutiny a president gets just after the inauguration, Obama managed to take all these actions with nary a mention from the White House press corps.

The moves escaped notice because they were never announced by the White House Press Office and were never placed on the White House web site.

Two of Obama's actions on regulatory reform were spotted by bloggers, lobbying groups and trade publications after they emerged in the Federal Register.

There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the omissions. A proclamation Obama issued on February 2 for African-American History Month was e-mailed to the press and posted on the White House web site. But another presidential proclamation the same day for American Heart Month slipped by.

Such notices were routinely released by the White House press office during prior administrations — making their omission all the more unusual given Obama’s oft-repeated pledges of openness.

Will the main-stream media begin reporting on future White House irregularities? Not unless they suddenly decide to report stories that could show Mr. Obama in a bad light.

Of greater concern is what is happening that is not being discovered by bloggers and others.

Link

Neither sleet, nor snow nor gloom of night…

A mailman drives through the snow-covered village of Bedretto in southern Switzerland. The village had not been reachable for several days due to very heavy snowfall. (AP Photo / February 2009)

Trying to prove Abraham Lincoln wrong?

Abraham Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

With the help of the main-stream media, Barack Obama seems to be trying to prove Lincoln wrong by attempting to fool all of the people all of the time.

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Speaking of Abraham Lincoln …
In this bicentennial celebration of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Obama has tried valiantly to clothe himself in the qualities of Lincoln.

By the end of this Lincoln bicentennial year, Barack Hussein Obama will have proved Lincoln wrong or Americans will have seen through the charade and realize that he is not fit to polish the boots of Abraham Lincoln.

No, this blog has not been abandoned…

It seems like an eternity since the last posting. It’s been about a week - a successful but not very memorable week.

For some, carotid endarterectomy surgery goes better than for others. This one went about as well as one could expect.

Thanks for all of your prayers and well wishes!